


Tassels

by BurningTea



Category: Leverage
Genre: Confused Eliot, Drinking, Hangover, I blame lynne-monstr, It is now, M/M, Memory Loss, Tassels, is that a tag?, there I started one, we should have a blame lynne-monstr tag by now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-14 01:44:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9151285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: Eliot wakes up at Nate's with no memory of how he got there. It's a case of too much drink and not enough clothing, because Eliot appears to be wearing clothes he normally admires at a strip-club. The team have to piece together how it happened.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lynne_monstr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynne_monstr/gifts).



> As I say in the tags, this is lynne_monstr's fault. Well, it might partly be mine, but where's the fun in blaming yourself? 
> 
> Based on a 'texts from last night' post from letsgostealaleverageblog. (I'll link when I get my head together) and a short conversation with lynne_monstr. And her tags. The tags are her fault.

“Eliot?” 

The voice is slurred. Or maybe that’s the inside of his head. 

“Eliot, what happened?”

Yeah. It’s the inside of his head. Other sounds are slurred and out of focus, too. No. That’s not the right word for sounds, except that it makes a kind of sense just now. 

“Are you conscious? Eliot, if you can hear me, I’m going to check your pulse.”

It’s Nate, he thinks. It’s Nate sounding…concerned? Never good. Eliot struggles to get his mental gears lined up and gets as far as prying one eye open. And there’s Nate, inches away from him, his mouth a grim line and one hand most of the way to Eliot’s neck. 

“Hey!” 

Eliot shifts back and up, scrabbling to an almost seated position and slapping at Nate’s hand. Or where Nate’s hand should be. He misses, which…less good than Nate sounding worried. 

“What’s going on?” Eliot asks, and has to stop and swallow. His throat is dry and raw. 

Nate huffs and sits down next to him, resting his elbows on his own knees and looking sideways at Eliot. The guy looks rumpled, but that’s hardly a shock. Nate seems to have set his whole self to rumpled and stuck with it, except for when he’s playing sharp for a con. Since he decided to be a drunk thief, it’s been a case of keeping an eye on how bad it gets, but no way is Eliot going to be able to stop him, not unless Nate wants to be stopped.

And the pain-punch to Eliot’s left temple tells him he’s in a glass-houses situation here, even if he can’t remember drinking so much as one beer. Actually…

“Did you talk me into getting drunk with you?” Eliot asks, because they’re in Nate’s apartment, on Nate’s couch, and the last thing Eliot remembers is…is… Yeah. No. He’s got nothing. “What the hell, man.”

He can’t snap it at Nate, because speaking much above a whisper just isn’t working, and every word adds a nail-scratch-on-a-backboard sensation to the inside of his skull. He settles for narrowing his eyes and glaring. Well, narrowing them further.

“You left here before lunch yesterday,” Nate tells him, speaking carefully. Maybe Eliot doesn’t look all the way with it. “I didn’t even hear you come in.”

Ah. So this is nothing to do with Nate. Or a con. Except…

“There was something,” he says. “I can’t remember.”

“Yeah, well, how about I get you a mug of coffee and we get you alert enough to shower,” Nate says. “Wash the…all that off you.”

Nate waves a hand vaguely at Eliot, who becomes aware he’s cooler than he might expect and that he can feel the texture of the couch on the skin of his back. 

Glancing down, he feels his jaw lock with restraining the urge to yell. He’s apparently lost most of his clothes. And what he is wearing is not his clothing. He’s wearing jeans, but they are a lot tighter than anything he’d normally squeeze into. It’s got to be the hangover, because no way would he have missed the way the material skims so close to his skin otherwise. Hell, he’s not sure how he can move in them. Not that the tight black jeans are the worst thing.

“Tassels? Seriously?”

Nate raises his hands. He stands and crosses to the kitchen as he talks, and it’s weird being the one who’s worst for wear out of the two of them. Eliot’s never seen Nate wake up wearing this kind of thing, either, though he could have missed that.

“Nothing to do with me. I just came downstairs to find you in jeans that look spray-painted on and nipple tassels. I try not to judge.”

“This ain’t a regular thing!” Eliot hisses. 

He needs to get up and escape to the shower. They all keep some spare clothes stashed at the apartment, just in case, and he needs to get into them right the hell now, before anyone else turns up. No telling who will arrive at Nate’s or when, and for the first time Eliot finds that annoying. 

The click of the apartment door opening galvanizes him into action, but he only makes it as far as to his feet before Sophie is inside and stopping in her tracks. Her eyes widen and she makes a face Eliot usually sees her produce when she sees a shoe-sale. 

“What?” he snaps.

“Eliot, are you taking up stripping? Or hooking?” she asks. “If you’ve run out of money, you can just tell us and we’ll help you out.”

There is no cause for her to look as delighted as all that. She even drops the bags she’s carrying at her feet and turns to Nate with a smile.

“What have you got planned to make Eliot dress like that? How did you get Eliot to dress like that? Can you do it more often?”

Nate shakes his head. He keeps making coffee, though, so Eliot tentatively leaves him off the kill list. 

“Yeah, no, I’ve got no idea,” Nate says. “Maybe, you know, having Parker around has finally broken him. And Hardison turned up in that wookie outfit once. Perhaps Eliot’s just got comfortable enough around us to show this side of himself.”

“This ain’t a side of myself!” Eliot says, and sheer embarrassment and confusion give his voice power. It’s not like he’ll shy away from wearing whatever they need him to for a con. It’s just he doesn’t know why he’s dressed like this and he hates feeling out of control. Control is what he has. “You think I have a whole drawer full of tassels and I just now decided to start wearing them? I don’t even know where these came from!”

Sophie looks back at him and her smile changes. It’s a little more sympathetic, but still too gleeful. She makes her way over and gestures for him to sit back down. Even though he wants to get to his real clothes and get changed, he does as she wants. The headache isn’t any better and he’s feeling like throwing up might be on the cards. There are so many reasons he does not get drunk. 

“Heavy night out?” she asks. “You left the bar saying you were going to meet a friend. Did it get out of hand?”

“I don’t remember,” Eliot says, slumping.

“Well, if you’re trying to piece together your night, I can tell you where those tassels came from,” she says, and leans sideways with her left arm over the back of the settee. “I can tell you the exact strip-club.”

“Strip-club,” Eliot repeats, his tone flat. “They’re from a specific strip-club?”

It feels like something he should know, but he hasn’t been to strip clubs as much since moving to Boston. He hasn’t thought overmuch on why not.

“Yes,” Sophie says, and her smile grows, her eyes brighter than Eliot can cope with at this moment in time. “It’s a very distinctive color scheme.”

“Just tell the man, Sophie,” Nate says, “I don’t need this going on all day.”

“Oh, all right, then,” she says. “There’s a place down near that sushi restaurant you like, the one with the chef you say is worth twenty times his weight in salt, just a few blocks away. It’s called the, oh. I don’t know. Something to do with cords. The Blue Cord? Does that sound right?” Waving a hand, she moves on. “Anyway, I can give you the address if you want to go back and ask, or, oh, you could get Hardison to get hold of the security footage. Maybe you’re on it.”

“No,” he grinds out. 

“If you want to work out what happened, you should try something,” Sophie says. “I can’t help you with the body glitter, though. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to anything except the tassels. What? It was part of a con, okay? I just helped a friend out and it happened we needed to pretend to be on our way to a shift there. Well, my friend actually does work there part time. Oh! I could call her. Perhaps she was at work last night.”

Before Eliot can stop her, Sophie has the phone out and is making the call. If that isn’t bad enough, Parker and Hardison burst in, in the middle of an argument about something to do with green-skinned women and both cutting that off as soon as they see him. 

Hardison looks even more delighted than Sophie did. Parker just frowns.

“Are we supposed to all wear tassels, now?” she asks. 

“No!” Nate and Sophie say together. 

Parker shrugs and throws herself into one of the armchairs. Hardison stays where he is, folding one arm across his body and tapping his chin with his other hand, like he’s studying a piece of art and wants to make sure he gets each and every nuance.

“Is this a breakdown?” he asks, at last. “You having a mid-life crisis and it’s taking the form of Lycra jeans and tassels? And is that a hickey on your neck?”

“What?”

Eliot slaps a hand to his neck, even though he’s got no idea which side Hardison means. This is about as mortifying as he can handle, and he’s about to risk the increase in pain that shouting at them will bring when Sophie reaches out and grabs his knee. 

It shocks him enough that he doesn’t do anything about it except look at her hand. 

“Really?” Sophie says into her phone. Eliot hadn’t realized she was talking to someone already, which is just another sign of how messed up he is. “You’re certain? Oh. No. No, that’s perfect. Thank you so much, Kacey. Yes, very much so. Thank-you. And, let me know when you’re having that cocktail night.”

After a few more farewells, Sophie ends the call and turns to Eliot properly. She pats at his knee but doesn’t remove her hand, and he finds she’s leaning in like she has the best news to share. 

“Kacey says you were there most of the night,” Sophie says. “And you were either running a con without us or you have taken up hooking part time.”

“Eliot, my man, tell me we can find out the rest of this story,” Hardison says.

“Eliot can’t tell you,” Nate says, finally, finally, bringing that coffee over. “He doesn’t remember last night.”

“Eliot got so drunk he can’t remember?” Hardison asks. “Oh, we are so getting to the bottom of this.”

There’s a flicker of concern in that, and in Sophie’s expression, now Eliot takes the time to think. Normally, he’d spot that right away, but with his head still foggy he’s slow on the uptake. They’re finding this hilarious, but they’re ready to shift into protectiveness if it turns out he was drugged or that something bad happened. It’s touching. Eliot doesn’t like to remind them just now that he’s taken out a whole load of people before when on military grade interrogation drugs, partly because he’s not sure he’d leave people alive if he thought he was in that state. 

Perhaps finding out he got so drunk he thought tassels were funny, and that switching careers for a night was something to try, is the better outcome.

Within ten minutes, Hardison has an image from a camera across the street from the club. It’ll take longer to get footage from inside the club, because it’s not accessible over the Internet, and Nate’s decided not to send Sophie over for it unless they have to. Eliot’s reached the point where getting through a cup of coffee is testing his gag reflex, so he lets them sort this out for him. 

They all look up at the screens on the wall and Eliot tries not to break the cup.

In the shot Hardison has, Eliot is leaning against a guy who’s maybe a head taller than he is. And leaning is the right word. Hell, he’s practically draped over the guy, looking up at him like the man has the answers to every one of Eliot’s dream. 

“Good stance,” Sophie says, the compliment sounding sincere. “I recognize that. You stole that from me! Nice action with the hip, too. Very alluring. Makes you look totally non-threatening and available, but only for the right price. I’ll have to teach you more.”

“Can you teach me, too?” Parker asks. “For in case we all start wearing tassels?”

“No,” Nate says. “And why was Eliot doing that?”

“Oh, come on, Nate,” Sophie says. “That man is clearly thirty seconds away from paying any price Eliot wants.”

Nate takes the time to fix Sophie with one of those looks that says he’s wondering if crawling back into a cubicle in an office might not be the better idea, and speaks with barely concealed impatience. Eliot wonders how much whiskey Nate has in that coffee he’s holding.

“You do remember that Eliot hasn’t really changed jobs to being a prostitute?” Nate asks. 

Sophie rolls her eyes. 

“Once you’ve got someone like that pliant and separated off from his group, you can get whatever you want from him,” Sophie says, falling into the tone she uses when she’s sharing her hard-won expertise. “I’m assuming it’s a job someone asked you to do, Eliot, but really you should at least let us know in the future. What if you’d needed back-up?”

“You mean like that?” Hardison asks, and a second picture appears. 

This one has a second man getting into Eliot’s space, a hand on Eliot’s upper arm and a leer on his face. Eliot looks scared, but Sophie quickly points out it’s another of her expressions, and praises Eliot for his acting. 

“A touch more on the lip work, I think,” she says, tracing a line in the air around her own lips. “Just a little more of a pout, and anyone would think you only have those muscles because they look good coated in oil.”

Eliot’s too nauseas to even protest at that. Besides, oil can be fun, depending on context. 

“Yeah.” Hardison nods at the new image. “But look who’s coming to the rescue.”

And there, in the right hand corner, wearing a frankly terrifying shirt with what looks like lizard print, is Quinn. 

***

In the hour it takes for Quinn to be contacted and to arrive, Eliot finally gets himself into the shower. He’s wearing his own clothes and working on yet more coffee at the dining table, this time with some dry toast, when Quinn saunters in. 

The grin is enough to make Eliot regret whatever he’s about to hear, but knowing Quinn was around has settled something in his stomach. It can’t have gone too badly wrong with the other hitter present. In the brief talk they had on the phone, Quinn got as far as laughing, asking Eliot if the body glitter washed off, and thanking him for the help on the job. With one question solved, Eliot’s just waiting to find out how come he doesn’t remember the damn job.

“Hey,” Quinn says. “You look like someone rolled you across a craft-table.”

“He looked even better earlier,” Hardison says. “Were the tassels your idea? Because on behalf of all people everywhere, thank you. Sincerely.”

“You burn those photos, Hardison,” Eliot says. He’s mollified to hear the growl in his own voice. 

“Yeah, no,” Hardison says. “I’m just choosing which one to use for our Christmas card this year.”

Before Eliot can do anything about that, Quinn sits down at the table opposite him and shrugs.

“What can I say, man?” he says. “I called, said we should grab a drink. Then we maybe had a few drinks. And then I got a call about a job. And we had a few more drink. And did the job.”

“At a strip club?” Eliot asks. 

He’s aware the others are listening, but he refuses to look over. Fighting with Hardison about those pictures can happen later. The guy will have erased them from all public access already, goes without saying. It’ll be making sure he never has to see them again, and that no-one in their admittedly limited social circle sees them, that’ll be the issue. In the meantime, he wants to know how Quinn talked him into the whole thing.

“Hey, that was your idea,” Quinn says, leaning back and draping an arm over the back of the chair next to him. He looks irritatingly together, his hair neatly tied back and his eyes shining. “And by the time we got there and had the whole you-being-an-escort plan sorted, so were the tassels.”

And no matter how much Eliot argues, or how creatively he threatens Quinn, the guy doesn’t shift from that story. 

“How come you didn’t have to wear them?” Eliot asks. 

“I was your pimp!” Quinn says. “And let me tell you, if we ever decide to get out of the business for good, we can make good money.” He pauses, the look in his eyes changing just a fraction as he looks Eliot up and down. “I had to scare away more than one guy who was wanting to pay any price for a taste.”

Hardison almost chokes on his orange soda and Parker wants to know how they’d have made money. Sophie says they’ll talk about it over a cup of tea later, but Nate has clearly had enough by now. 

“All right. If we’re sure Eliot wasn’t kidnapped or drugged or anything we need to deal with, did the job at least reach a conclusion?”

“Yeah. It did,” Quinn says. “We got the item and saved three men who aren’t really hitters as a sideline. If you’re wondering where the bruises on your thigh are from, that’s all part of the last bit.”

Eliot noted the bruises in the shower, but they aren’t bad and he hasn’t even mentioned them to the team. There’s no hickey, and he will be getting back at Hardison for that comment, but now isn’t the time to worry about it. 

Nate chases them all out shortly after that, telling them not to come back until at least the next morning, and Quinn gets up to leave before Eliot does. He rounds the table and leans in before he goes, dropping his voice so only Eliot will be able to hear. Unless Hardison has the place bugged.

“The bruises on your hips are from later,” Quinn says. “From me.”

“What?” Eliot jerks away and glares at him. “What bruises?” As the others looks across, he moves back in until he’s only an inch from Quinn’s face and hisses the next part. “There ain’t any bruises on my hips!”

“Well, no,” Quinn says. “I told you - they’re from later. Last night, I had to say no way, not when you were as drunk as you ended up, not even when you begged. But you look all sober now, so… How about it?.”

The begging does not sound like Eliot, but up until a couple of hours ago he wouldn’t have said tassels did, either, and it’s not like Quinn and he haven’t come close before. It just…never got to the point where they crossed that line. But if he really did suggest it, and Quinn really did only turn him down because Eliot wasn’t in a fit state to consent, then maybe something can be salvaged from all of this, after all. Something he can remember.

And if anyone wonders why Eliot says he’s giving Quinn a lift, they don’t mention it. He does see Sophie give him a knowing smile when he takes the tassels.


End file.
